


The Past Ever Changing

by DarknessAroundUs



Series: Supernatural AU [8]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 18:18:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18349109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarknessAroundUs/pseuds/DarknessAroundUs
Summary: When Betty is born, Alice is exhausted. Labor was fifteen hours long and she had chosen to go without an epidural. Alice could hardly be blamed for missing the first time Betty time traveled.The first time Forsythe time travels he never returns. At two months old he vanishes from the trailer, and arrives on the kitchen table of Lyle and Carrie Sondiak.





	The Past Ever Changing

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to KittiLee for beta-ing and encouraging this! I am so grateful!

When Betty is born, Alice is exhausted. Labor was fifteen hours long and she had chosen to go without an epidural. Alice could hardly be blamed for missing the first time Betty time traveled. 

Hal was out getting coffee. He returned to see Alice in her hospital bed, asleep, no Betty in sight. Hal rushes out in a panic to get a nurse, but by the time he returns to the room, Betty is wiggling in her bassinet. Hal marks it down to exhaustion induced insanity. 

The second time Betty time travels, no one misses it. Not Alice, or Hal, or the nurse, or the Doctor who was holding her when it happened. 

Alice cries when they take Betty away from her. Hal just pats her shoulder and says “It’s probably for the best. Our girl is going to be a hero dear.”

The Hartwood Academy for Time Travelers where Betty is raised, sends them monthly updates, and so they are kept apprised of her growth from afar. She will always be their families missing piece, but as everyone points out to them, it is really for the best. 

Time travelers are a rarity. They live their lives in service to the greater good, the Empire. First as trainees at the Academy, and then when they come of age, as agents. 

Serving the Empire is all that Betty ever knows. The caretakers that raise her for the first three years of her life are loyal employees of the Emperor himself. Everyone she meets and interacts with throughout her highly regimented daily life at Hartwood Academy is a thoroughly vetted Empire loyalist.

The library at the school is devoid of any book that would spark rebellion, of anything that might encourage questioning. 

The way the empire came to be formed was through time travel. The Emperor only continues to rule successfully because of the ongoing work of time travelers. When an act of rebellion takes place, it is simply erased through time travel the agents eliminating the perpetrators and their weapons. At twelve Betty doesn’t know this. At fourteen she’s starting to figure it out.

When Forsythe Pendleton Jones the III is born, FP cries and Gladys looks away from her son. She nurses him, she rocks him when he screams, but mostly she tries not to make eye contact.

The first time Forsythe time travels he never returns. At two months old he vanishes from the trailer, and arrives on the kitchen table of Lyle and Carrie Sondiak. A couple who have tried for a decade to have children. 

Because he arrives without a name they know of, Lyle and Carrie rename him Jeremiah. It means God’s gift. By the time he’s in Kindergarten, he goes by Jughead, even though Lyle and Carrie still think he’s heaven sent. 

Over in the Sunnyside Trailer park, mere miles away, Gladys also feels like God has granted her a gift. She leaves FP and never looks back. 

Lyle figures out right away that Jughead must be a time traveler, and initially all of his efforts as a parent go towards preventing Jughead from traveling. Lyle and Carrie know that if the government catches wind of their new found son’s ability, they will lose him as quickly as they gained him.

Lyle does discrete research into how to trap a time traveler. It turns out that restraints work, as long as the traveler is anchored to a large enough object. If the object is too small they will just time travel with it. 

Jughead spends all of his life under two, anchored to something or another. Often his mother or father, but also his modified crib, his modified pack and play, and sometimes just a wall. 

They feel like bad parents, but Jughead doesn’t seem to mind. It’s all he’s ever known. Besides he clearly flourishes under their love and guidance. They spend as much time as they can reading to him and taking him on walks in a stroller discreetly weighted down with bricks. 

By the time Jughead is two and a half he has enough control over himself to not time travel spontaneously. Lyle and Carrie are grateful to retire the restraints, at least most of the time. He still sleeps in them.

Jughead becomes adept at time travel quickly. He, like all time travelers, can only go backwards in time. He can never go to the future. The present is a line he can’t cross.

Jughead also has geographic restrictions. He can time travel to anywhere within a four mile radius of his current location, and he can also travel anywhere he’s been before. Once he figures that part out at nine, he’s always begging to travel.

Lyle and Carrie are wealthy enough to live in a house, but they’re still Southsiders. Lyle’s a mailman and Carrie was a teacher before Jughead’s surprise arrival. Still they manage to save enough to travel some with Jughead.

Lyle tries to teach Jughead caution, but he’s so used to time traveling by the time he’s fourteen and they’ve finally saved up enough money to go to New York City for a week, that he thinks nothing of slipping seventy years into the past on Ellis Island to see what it was like back then. 

It’s a mistake. The first person he sees is a fellow time traveler. Not a rogue minor like himself, but an adult, an agent of the Empire. It makes sense that someone would be there really. This is a major historical attraction after all. They sedate Jughead before he can fight back or escape.

They try to force him to tell them who's been hiding him all these years. Eventually they give up and Jughead is proud of himself for not breaking down. He’s too valuable of an asset for any form of torture that might do actual damage, either mental or physical. 

When he arrives at Hartwood, Jughead is belligerent, sullen, and angry. He misses his parents. He misses the freedom they took away from him when they slipped a chip into his wrist. He can only travel for them now. 

This puts him in a sour mood by the time his peer mentor meets him in the lobby. Betty Cooper is not sullen, she’s all smiles. She is the kind of girl who wears a rainbow t-shirt. Not a metaphorical one either. When Jughead sees her for the first time he thinks, this is what you look like after you drink the fresh-aide. 

He wants to hate her. He really does. He doesn’t meet her gaze for the whole tour, he says nothing but sarcastic remarks, but when she asks him if he wants to eat lunch with her, of course he says, yes. 

By evening, he’s discovered they have a similar taste in movies and books. By the end of the week when she forces the administration to finally discipline Chuck Clayton, he sees the darkness that runs in her veins. He likes that she can hide her edges in a way that he cannot. 

He hates everything else about school. He hates the constant history classes, the combat training, the emphasis on historically accurate costumes, but he finds himself complaining less and less as he finds himself spending more and more time by Betty’s side. 

In the morning, she lets him eat her bacon and he pretends to judge her for putting too much sugar in her coffee. Slowly her friends, Veronica Lodge and Archie Andrews, become his friends. It seems strange after all these years of only spending time with his family, of closely guarding his secret, to be so open with friends.

But it is hard, after years of traveling through time like walking through the park, to not be able to do it suddenly is like being in prison. It’s a nice prison, one with expensive mattresses, excellent teachers, and the kind of breakfast buffet one expects at a five star resort, but it is a prison nonetheless. 

They spend only one to two hours a month actually traveling through time. The rest is spent in school where they are learn minutia about the past, such as the fact that men didn’t start wearing underwear until the 17th century. They also learn krav maga and lock picking. Jughead feels leashed and useless. 

He hates the perimeters of the job he’s training to do. The idea of going back in time to stop rebellions that at least a small part of him supports, does not appeal to him in anyway.

Naturally he starts to plan his escape. He knows where they've inserted the restraint chip in his body. He can remove it with the exacto knife he’s stolen from the arts room, then as quickly as possible time travel to a hospital where they can patch him up before he can bleed out. 

However, these actions require a certain level of self-discipline that he’s not sure he has. It’s not the idea of cutting himself free that’s stopping him, it’s his best friend, the one that is at the top of their class and seems so straight laced. The one that secretly escapes her dorm most nights to gaze up at the stars from the very off limits roof. The one that puts sugar in her coffee, but prefers her pancakes without chocolate chips. 

He may not have kissed her yet, but he already knows he loves Betty. He loves her so much, he spends a whole year at Hartwood, keeping his complaints to himself. They write essays together and go on walks, and spend hours reading in the library. When she falls asleep reading, her head rests heavy on his shoulder and he wishes he had a way of preserving this feeling, this comforting weight. 

Then one day, when she reads an excerpt of Pride & Prejudice to him, not even a particularly interesting excerpt to be honest, he finds himself kissing her, and suddenly this relationship they’ve been on the cusp of for almost a year, unfurls and becomes his everything, 

They still sneak onto the roof at night, but if they rarely look up at the stars, who could blame them. 

It’s not like the Empire discourages relationships between time travelers, quite the opposite actually. If two travelers procreate, their child is much more likely to have their ability. So they don’t hide their affection. They don’t flaunt it with kisses like Archie and Veronica but with permanently linked hands. 

Then while shadowing a full fledged agent as part of his training, Jughead sees the reality of the work the Empire has in store for him when he turns 19. He tries not to dwell on it, but the image of the kids going off to prison, of the parents being slaughtered, put him on a ledge that Betty can’t talk him off of. 

But he can’t leave without telling her, and even though they’ve never talked about escape or the Empire, in all those years they’ve been together as friends, and those few months they’ve been something more, she takes his hand and kisses it, and says yes to escaping together. 

It’s not a fairy tale ending. There are no expensive mattresses or five star feasts where they end up. There’s a war on somewhere and the internet isn’t really the internet yet, but they have each other, and that cliché exists for a reason.

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment! They make my day!


End file.
